Freak Injuries and the Other Kind

How do you hurt yourself jumping on home plate? Injuries can happen any time in a million different ways. Ask Kendry Morales.

No one has ever been hurt (at least as far as I can recall) jumping on home plate after a walk-off homerun, but there is always a first time for everything, and it was bound to happen soon or a later.

This time it happened. At least it’s better than breaking your hand punching out a wall after something goes against you on the field. That one’s happened too many times to count.

Or you could cut off the tip of your finger using a hedge trimmer like Bobby Ojeda back in 1988. Actually, I just looked at this wikipedia article about Ojeda, which says that the real story was that he lost the finger when it was slammed in a door when the Mets were drunkenly celebrating clinching a play-off spot that year. However, the wiki article provides no citation for this alleged “true story”, and I wasn’t able to find anything on the web from what I would consider a reliable source.

Either way, Ojeda probably isn’t one of the sharpest guys ever to put on a baseball uniform. He was also famously involved in the boating accident that killed Tim Crews and Steve Olin back in Spring Training 1993. Crews was the one piloting the boat, but he was almost assuredly not the only one who was drunk as a skunk at the moment of impact.

Sorry Bobby, no one gets to live down an episode that stupid and deadly.

The Angels will be without Morales for a good long time, which is going to hurt their playoff chances. Despite a poor start, the Angels are still only 2.5 games out in the AL West (looking like the weakest division in baseball this year, a title held by the NL West the last few seasons), so they are certainly going to miss Morales.

The Indians’ Grady Sizemore is about to undergo knee surgery, which could cost him the rest of the ’10 season. One has to wonder if he isn’t going to be the next Eric Chavez.

Like Chavez, Grady had a string of seasons at the start of his career in which he was injury free, but this is the second year in a row which he’s suffered major injuries. Last year, it was groin and elbow problems. Now it’s his knee.

Grady turns 28 in August, which is roughly the same age at which Chavez began to fall apart. I hope it isn’t so, because Grady was a great player, but the cynic in me says it’s a real possibility.